A false science has led a mother to give her autistic sons bleach – and the police have done nothing to stop it



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Laurel Austin has documented the first dose of chlorine dioxide from her son Jeremy on YouTube. In the 30-second video, Jeremy, 27, sits at a kitchen table while his mother recounts his mood. Then his arms seem to twist involuntarily around one another and he screams in his forearm before taking a banana bite, reports NBC News.

"It's to hope and pray," she says.

Austin, 51, is a photographer in Lenexa, Kansas, the mother of six children, including four adults with autism. For the past year, according to her social media posts and police investigation documents, Laurel Austin has donated chlorine dioxide to two of her adult sons, Jeremy and Joshua. The Food and Drug Administration warns that bleach is a solution and that doctors claim that it can be harmful to health when it is ingested, especially for the digestive system and the kidneys.

Since January, when Bradley Austin learned that his ex-wife was using chlorine dioxide for their sons, he tries to stop him. But the local police, the state's adult protection services division and attending physician Jeremy all refused to intervene. A police spokesman said that there was not enough evidence that chlorine dioxide was dangerous; A social worker from the Kansas Adult Protection Services told the police that she did not consider the situation serious enough for the state to act.

The Austins case illustrates how online misinformation on health can become so ubiquitous that it begins to influence not only the marginalized in search of alternative treatments and explanations, but also the authorities.

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